tasks can produce fairer measures of all students' intellectual development.³ Others have cautioned that new assessment content and methods alone can not assure equity:

Designing for equity requires conscientious rethinking of not just what we assess and how we do it, but how different individuals and groups are affected by assessment design and procedures. It also requires conscientious attention to how we use assessment results to make decisions about individual children and the schools they attend.

To meet the equity principle, tasks must be designed to give children a sense of accomplishment, to challenge the upper reaches of each child's mathematical understanding, and to provide a window on each student's mathematical thinking. Just as good instruction accommodates differences in the ways learners construct knowledge, good assessments accommodate differences in the ways that students think about mathematics and display mathematical understanding. Although all students are to be assessed on important mathematical concepts and skills, in accord with the content and learning principles, the equity principle implies that assessments must be sufficiently flexible to allow all students to show what they know and can do.